1/English Sentence Practice

Peter goes into his first lecture and he is struck by how young everybody else is. He thinks to himself that perhaps University was not for him and maybe he would have been better off doing a Masters.

However, he would consider that in all good time. For the time being, he was committed to studying modern languages.

After all, the decision was not taken on the spur of the moment. His idea of academia was to brush shoulders with clever people and learn new learning techniques. The Textbook knowledge could be found online. University would give him the necessary structure and stimulus. He resolved to talk about his trepidations to Sara at the weekend, after all, a stitch in time saves nine.

As he was having doubts, it would be better to switch studies rather than spend donkey’s years doing something he wouldn’t benefit from. Perhaps he would change course in the nick of time and find the right academic environment.

Just the other day, his father was saying that university these days, was all about money and curating content from the internet.

And that what Peter was searching for what existed in the Halcyon days before his time.

Unfortunately, Peter’s first impressions were hardly ever the wrong ones and it was only once in a blue moon that he was wrong.

The lecture began and today’s subject was the importance of learning grammar. English speakers often skip over grammar because English is learned intuitively.

They say that what stops many people learning English is trying to analyse the grammar too much. They often fall into the trap of translating literally. What stops English people from learning languages is they labour under the illusion that grammar is unimportant. They say that one has to find the right balance or happy medium as they say.

The lecture finished and he felt he was none the wiser. He left the building and set off to his new accommodation to bury his head in a book.

Peter liked to keep regular hours, that way he could work for hours on end. He had worked for a large multinational corporation on leaving school, so hard work was no stranger to him.

He made up his mind to keep an open mind and wait and see what transpires at his first tutorial the following morning. One of his course choices was 19th-century French literature and he could not wait to look at the bibliography. He had read a few of the French classics of the time but translated into English. It was one of the subsidiary subjects that he wanted tofocus upon. When he got back to his flat he could not start his studies in earnest, because he was kept waiting for half an hour by a defective internet connection. The coursework for the first term appeared before him as soon as the internet connection was reestablished.

He opened the module for French literature and found the list of works he was required to read.

There were no surprises: Balzac, Le Pere Goriot, Maupassant, Mont Oriol and Flaubert, Education Sentimentale. The books were available in the University Library but Peter preferred to download a copy on his Cindle.

Despite his initial disillusionment, he could not wait to begin to actually embrace new cultures.

The only way to do that was to think like them, in their language.

He had studied a bit of French but he thought that he needed someone to explain the subjunctive to him. He just could not get his head around it. The notion exists in English but not with the same conjugation. He would bring up the question at the first opportune moment.

He had taken into consideration the advantage of a tutor to respond to his questions.

Imagine being able to read a book in its original language and not only understand the story but also be able to grasp all the subtle cultural references. Such was the promise of the university’s website which boasted a highly effective teaching method. You have to vocalise every word and phrase, much in the way that a child learns his native language. It has been estimated that a student can learn a language four times more quickly. However, the technology might not work for everyone and the method had only been introduced recently.

There had been a report commissioned based on the first three years of results. In fact, the results of the study were on the verge of being published. Peter had been sufficiently convinced by the underlying logic to volunteer himself as a kind of guinea pig.

English Pronunciation

YYLet’s discover some consonant sounds together, curr ,your tongue is up at the back of your teeth, it then drops by moving away from the palette, releasing air, curr, key, cartridge, question, chemist, banking, echo ,cauliflower.Let’s repeat, curr, key, cartridge, question, chemist, banking, echo ,cauliflower. Now test time, how would you pronounce these words? The answer is; caper, lock, aqueducts. That’s it for today, see you soon.